Jerusalem Temple

The Second Temple complex on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, vastly enlarged by Herod the Great in the decades before Christ — the Court of the Gentiles a paved esplanade nearly half a kilometer long, ringed by colonnaded porticoes, with the inner courts of the Israelites and priests stepping up toward the sanctuary itself. This is the temple Jesus enters on Palm Sunday and from which he drives out the money-changers (Mark 11); fifty days after the resurrection, the disciples are gathered in one of its colonnades when the Spirit falls at Pentecost (Acts 2). Destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE; the surviving western retaining wall is today the Western Wall.